


the babysitter

by amomentsilence



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Babysitting, Don't read this if u havent watched the movie bc it will spoil it so bad, Peter being a big brother, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Post-Endgame, read at ur own risk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-01
Updated: 2019-05-01
Packaged: 2020-02-15 17:58:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18674668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amomentsilence/pseuds/amomentsilence
Summary: In which Peter is trusted with a child, for some reason.





	the babysitter

**Author's Note:**

> OK first i wanna apologise for this being so short and bad, but i wrote it in 3 days in a rush in amongst art exam buildup work and a shit ton of gcse revision. this'll be the last thing i post on here until at least july, probably, because gcses are already kicking my ass. okay anyway enjoy thanks bye <3

Peter really isn’t expecting the call.

May is working a late night at the shelter, which she’d explained with a concise note left in the middle of the kitchen counter, underneath a twenty dollar bill for takeout. The takeout guy is the only person he’s expecting to encounter this evening, besides the Instagram group chat which buzzes every two minutes and John Mulaney on Netflix. That’s until his phone rings.

The number isn’t saved on his phone, so he almost doesn’t answer it. It’s only when he realises that it could be May calling in an emergency, or Ned or MJ or anyone else, that anxiety forces him to pick the phone up. The line between his Spidey senses and generalised anxiety disorder is a thin one that he treads very carefully.

“Hello?”

The woman on the other end of the line sighs in relief, “Peter, thank God you picked up.”

He recognises her voice instantly - from the news, from the battle, from the funeral. He scrambles to find the remote and pause the TV.

“Mrs Potts? Why are you — what is — uh — how are you?”

They haven’t spoken since the wake, when she’d hugged him and let him cry into her shoulder. His heart seizes at the memory of her calm composure, supporting a boy she barely knew while he fell apart over the death of the man she loved.

“I’m doing alright, thank you,” she answers. “I have a favor to ask.”

“Okay.”

“Would you be able to babysit Morgan for a few hours?” Peter’s hand freezes on it’s way to the bag of Cheetos next to him on the couch. “I wouldn’t normally ask with such little notice, but I have to do some stuff for the Foundation launch, and our regular sitter fell through.”

“That’s no problem at all,” Peter says, without even thinking about it. “I didn’t have plans, anyway.”

Pepper exhales with relief, “That’s amazing. I’ve sent Happy to pick you up, he should be there soon. Thank you so much, this is such a big help.”

As soon as he places his phone down, Peter realises that he knows absolutely nothing about taking care of a kid, and that he’s currently in nothing but ratty sweatpants and an old sports jersey.

He practically launches himself over the back of the couch, abandoning his show and his takeout to race into his bedroom. His pyjamas are replaced with black jeans and a thick wool sweater over a tshirt, and he just manages to comb through his hair and spray himself with deodorant before his phone chimes from the couch and he races to check it.

 **_Unknown Number:_ ** **Outside. – Happy**

He texts May to let her know where he’s going while he bounds down the stairs. Sure enough, Happy is waiting on the sidewalk, leaning up against a black car.

To Peter’s surprise, Happy ignores his offered handshake and instead pulls him in for a hug. The embrace lasts a long few seconds before Happy pulls back, his hand lingering on Peter’s shoulder. “How you holding up, kid?”

“Okay,” Peter says. Happy opens the passenger side door for Peter and rounds the car to get in behind the wheel. The doors slam, and Peter talks over the starting of the engine. “School’s getting intense, and — uh — everyone’s getting excited for prom. But, uh… Yeah, that’s sort of it.”

Happy glances at him out of the corner of his eye as he pulls the car out into the road. “Prom, huh? You got your eye on anyone? Planning a…. what do you call it? A _promposal_?”

Peter thinks about MJ, about Ned, about Harley, about the guy in his physics class who always lets him share his textbook when Peter forgets… “I haven’t really thought about it, uh, with everything going on.”

“I getcha, kid.” They come to a slow stop at a red light. “These past months have been pretty intense… I haven’t really known what to do with myself, to be honest.”

His voice has grown quiet, and the last word of the sentence almost dies completely. Peter looks over at him as he scrubs a hand over his face. _Is he crying_?

Happy is covering his face with one of his hands, now, shoulders shaking minutely. Peter has no idea what to do. What are you _supposed_ to do when your dead mentor’s assistant who hated you not that long ago is suddenly crying in front of you?

“Uh… Happy?” He gets no reply. “Happy?”

“Yeah, kid?” Happy looks up at him, his eyes tear-filled and puffy but a supportive smile on his face all the same.

“The light’s green.”

As if on cue, the car behind them beeps it’s horn, spurring Happy into moving the car forward.

Pepper Potts is waiting for them when they arrive at the house. It looks no different to how it did at the funeral, and it upsets him a little to look at the front porch and the small dock where they’d stood to say their final goodbye. She gives him a very brief tour of the house, and an explanation of Morgan’s bedtime routine. Apparently, she has already had her bath and her dinner, so the only thing Peter has to do is put her to bed by eight.

“There’s enough food in the refrigerator and the pantry for you to make yourself something to eat, feel free to watch whatever you want on the TV, and I should be home by eleven, but if you’re tired by then you’re welcome to sleep in the guest room.” She pauses, taps her fingertips together as if checking off a list, and then drops her hands and smiles warmly at him. “I really can’t thank you enough for doing this.”

How could he have said no? He understands more than anyone what grief feels like, and if the obvious exhaustion underlying her composed expression is anything to go by, being suddenly thrust into single parenthood has taken its toll on her. He remembers May wearing the same expression after his Uncle Ben died, and he knows now how much she’d needed an extra pair of hands.

“It’s really no problem, Mrs Potts.”

Her petite hand brushes his elbow, “Please, call me Pepper.”

She then crouches down to say goodbye to Morgan, and he politely looks away, for some reason he feels like that moment deserves privacy.

“You’ve got my number, so if there’s anything you need you can either call me or Happy, okay?” she assures him.

“Okay, Mrs — Pepper.”

She smiles, nods, and gives Morgan one last kiss on the cheek before leaving.

“We’ve got about forty minutes to kill before bedtime.” He looks down at the young girl. “What do you want to do?”

“Cartoons!” she exclaims, a gleeful grin on her pudgy face.

“Cartoons?” He turns toward the couch, expecting her to follow him. She grabs three of his fingers with her small hand and walks ahead of him, as if guiding him to the couch. He doesn’t have to wonder where she gets that from.

“Cartoons,” she clarifies, jumping up onto the couch with a huff.

He sits next to her and picks up the remote to start looking for the kids’ channels. “What’s your favorite cartoon?”

“Spongebob!” she says around her thumb.

It takes him all of five minutes to scroll through the entire TV guide and finally assess that there isn’t one channel currently playing an episode of Spongebob. Or any cartoons, it seems. He’s about to give up, when she holds out her hand.

“Remote.” The ‘R’ is more of a ‘W’, and she makes a grabby hand toward the remote until he passes it to her.

“There are no channels playing cartoons…” he begins to explain, bracing himself for a five-year-old temper tantrum. Instead of screaming or crying, however, he’s greeted with the familiar opening note of the Spongebob theme tune.

When he looks at her, she’s looking back at him with a cheeky grin. “How did you figure that out?”

“Mummy got it on the TV for me.” Her speech is pretty advanced for a five year old, but it’s obvious how hard she’s working to get her words right. “She said so I can watch it when I’m sad.”

His eyebrows knit together, and he fears sounding like a counsellor - or a parent - but he can’t help but ask, “Are you sad a lot?”

She shrugs, jams her thumb in her mouth and talks around it, “I watch Spongebob a lot.”

He ends up watching her more than he watches the cartoon, mesmerised by her starry-eyed expression as she watches the bright colours flash across the screen. They reflect in her big brown eyes, which he knows that she inherited from her dad. She also inherited her stubbornness, apparently, because even when her eyelids begin to droop and she can hardly sit upright for sleepiness, she doesn’t give in. She refuses to doze off until the end credits of the episode are rolling, and then she almost instantly collapses, snoring lightly, onto the couch cushions.

Careful not to wake her, he slips his arms underneath her armpits and lifts her. Her arms and legs wrap around him sleepily, making it much easier for him to carry her upstairs without fear of dropping her. He pushes the door open with the heel of his shoe, uses his right hand to continue supporting Morgan’s weight while his left pulls back the covers on her small bed. Once he’s placed her down and tucked the blanket up to her chin, he follows Pepper’s instructions of shutting the blind, turning on the nightlight next to her bed, and leaving the door slightly ajar when he eventually steps back out into the hall.

The TV is still displaying the paused credits of Spongebob when he sits back down on the couch. He wants to go onto Netflix and carry on with what he was watching earlier, but he feels like it might be a bit of an intrusion to use Pepper’s personal Netflix account, so he settles on a channel that seems to be only playing reruns of Family Guy.

His phone buzzes, and he glances at where it sits next to him on the couch.

 **_Ned_ ** **: Deathmatch?**

Peter can’t help his smile. After Thanos, and everything else that’s followed, the simple things like playing Overwatch with Ned - even if he loses every time - make him so much happier than they would have before.

 **_Peter_ ** **: can’t tonight, am babysitting.**

The next message from Ned comes through almost immediately.

 **_Ned_ ** **: Who tf trusted U with their kid?**

 **_Peter_ ** **: ikr**

 **_Peter_ ** **: pepper needed an extra hand w morgan**

Ned doesn’t reply, so he assumes that the match has started and settles down onto the plush couch cushions. He scrolls through his Instagram feed, through photos posted by people from school and the odd celebrity. Until, eventually, he dozes off with his phone still in his hand.

A loud bang makes him start awake what feels like five minutes later. His phone slips out of his hand and onto the floor, the _bang_ it creates making him startle again. He sits up blearily and stretches until his back pops. Through the windows, he can see nothing but black. His phone screen, when he picks it up to check, tells him that it’s just past nine-thirty. He hadn’t planned to sleep at all, let alone for an hour and a half.

Everything in the house still seems intact, and it doesn’t seem like Pepper is home, so he assumes that the bang was caused by the dog door, or something similar. Nevertheless, a residual anxiety forces him to his feet. He rubs the sleep from his eyes as he trudges up the stairs toward Morgan’s room.

The door is still slightly ajar, and the light from the hallway illuminates a strip of her polka dot duvet cover. He pushes the door open more, expecting to see her still tucked up tight and fast asleep.

She isn’t in her bed.

Peter’s stomach flips.

“Morgan?” he calls, hoping that she’s just hidden somewhere and will pop out giggling.

She doesn’t. He flicks the light on.

“Morgan?” He rounds the bed to check the other side, which is also empty.

She’s not hiding underneath the bed or in the wardrobe, and he checks every single room upstairs for her. But, she’s not in Pepper’s room, the guest room or the bathroom.

“Morgan!” he calls again as he races down the stairs. The downstairs bathroom is also empty, and she isn’t in the living room or the kitchen.

As he races back into the living room, his eyes lock on the front door. He can’t remember locking it behind Pepper, and he’d been woken up with a loud slam…

He throws open the front door, looking out onto the lake and the front garden, until there’s a small cough to his right.

There she is, her small form curled up on the rocking chair, thumb in her mouth and eyelids heavy with

He softens his voice to try and mask his panic. “What are you doing out here?”

“I can’t sleep,” she explains quietly. Her body seems to betray her there, though, because she lets out a yawn almost immediately.

He really doesn’t know how to get a stubborn kid to go back to sleep. He thinks back to when he was a kid, and how May would convince him to go to bed.

“You can have milk and cookies if you come back inside.”

She shakes her head.

“Juice pops?”

He remembers seeing them in the freezer earlier, and he assumes that she’ll be moved by the offer. She isn’t, and shakes her head again.

“I want to talk to daddy,” she says.

Peter’s brain takes a second too long to reboot, because she rolls her eyes and continues like he’s missed a very obvious point. “Mummy says that daddy can hear me if I sit here and talk to him.”

This is the first time this whole evening that Peter realises how much she must miss her dad. For the past few weeks, he’s felt like he’s been on autopilot, like there’s a vital part of him missing. So he can hardly imagine how she feels; she probably doesn’t even understand that he’s never coming back.

He doesn’t remember when his parents died, but he remembers asking May about them. He remembers the frown that would tug on her mouth every time he did. He remembers how much that frown would confuse him. _They’re in a better place_ , she would say, so why would she look so sad?

He understands the questions she probably has, he understands how overwhelmed she must feel, surrounded by sadness and falseness and feelings that she doesn’t yet understand. All she needs is some normality.

“I think daddy would want you to wear a jacket outside.”

She pouts indignantly and crosses her arms to let him know she isn’t going anywhere.

Knowing now that she isn’t being moved, he grabs the hem of his sweater and tugs it over his head. The hair on his arms immediately bristles against the cold, his t-shirt doing nothing to keep him warm.

He crouches in front of the chair so that he’s level with her, sweater held between them.

“This sweater belonged to my uncle Ben. He’s in the same place as your dad, but before he went, he gave me this sweater. Do you know what he told me when he gave it to me?” She shakes her head. “He told me that it would protect me against anything, and it can protect you, too.”

He remembers Ben passing it to him while they were queueing for the Haunted Mansion at Disney World. Peter had forced him and May to queue for almost two hours, only to get too scared and start sobbing as soon as they got closer to the ride. The sweater was supposed to be a mode of persuasion for a then nine year old Peter, but it’s his most treasured item, and memory.

After Ben had died, the only thing Peter wanted to keep was the sweater, and ever since, he has worn it whenever he needs extra comfort.

He’s been wearing it a lot recently.

“Anything?” Morgan repeats, eyes wide. “Even monsters?”

He laughs, “Even monsters. Do you want to put it on?”

She nods enthusiastically, and he silently praises himself for his quick thinking as he helps her pull it over her head. It’s too big for him, so it covers almost her whole body, and the sleeves are about twice the length of her arms. She looks a lot warmer and happier, though.

She reaches out to him, and he doesn’t understand what she wants until her hands pop out of the sleeves and open and close sporadically in a move which he reads as “pick me up”.

He picks her up around her waist, her arms wrapping around his neck, and then turns to sit on the chair. She shifts around until she’s sideways on his lap, facing the lake, her head cushioned on his shoulder and her hands pulled up under her chin. The sweater cocoons her like a swaddle.

“Can you tell me a story?”

He doesn’t know any stories for kids, unless the classic, Disney movie fairy tales count.

“Do you want a story about your dad?”

She nods, the movement clear against his shoulder.

“Okay.” He wills himself not to cry immediately at the memory of his mentor, not wanting to freak the kid out or undo the hard work Pepper has undoubtedly done on making this whole situation seem lighter for her. “When I met your dad, I’d just gone through a big change…”

He recites the story of Germany, and then, when she asks for another, the stories of the boat and of Titan. They’re shortened, censored, and the latter is missing the part where he turned to dust for five years, but they’re true. Calmed by the stories, and smiling at the talk of her dad, she eventually falls asleep soundly against his shoulder. He looks down at her serene face, and he hopes that she remembers the good things about Tony, he hopes that she’s dreaming about him. He hopes that she dreams about building pillow forts with him, about him carrying her on his hip while doing important research, about him tucking her into bed and kissing her forehead.

Pepper gets home not long after Peter has tucked her back into bed.

“Was she okay?” she asks in a whisper, although the house is definitely big enough to talk at full volume and not wake the sleeping girl.

“She was a dream.”

A small, relieved sigh stirs her fringe. “Good. I really can’t thank you enough.”

“It’s honestly fine,” he says. “I had fun.”

 

When he unlocks and pushes open the door of the apartment, May is in her pajamas on the couch, watching some reality TV show. She looks over the back of the couch when she hears the door close, and smiles. She seems tired, as she always does after working overtime, but she’s wearing her fluffy pink socks, which means that she’s happy.

“Good night?”

He sits next to her, slowly tipping sideways until his head lands on her bent knee. Her hand automatically goes to his hair, stroking the top of it like she used to when he was small and would sit on the floor between her knees while her and Ben watched TV. Then, she moves her hand to his upper arm, and her palm feels boiling hot against his skin. “You’re freezing.”

As she tugs the throw blanket over him and pulls him closer to her side, he realises that he didn’t take his sweater back.


End file.
